New Friends and Stranger Companies...2!

I've spent much of the last six weeks either fretting about my new found status as a driver, fretting about the purchase of a car or fretting about an impending PhD deadline.  The solution, I have found, has been to retreat to 1881 and read old newspaper reviews of Shakespeare productions.

A crash course in Shakespearean touring companies of the 1880s has left me realising that I really don't know very much at all.   I've thoroughly enjoyed reading about George Rignold, for example, whose production of Henry V gave star billing to his white charger 'Crispin'.  I have also enjoyed discovering that Ellen Wallis wasn't above falsifying some of the glowing reviews she used in publicity.  I've felt sad for Charles Dillon, former London star, who died on the High Street in Hawick where he was playing Othello at the Corn Exchange - rather a come-down for a man who once ran the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane - and I've marvelled at the extent of Henry Irving's tour of just about every bit of Lyceum scenery, drapery and property that could be crammed onto a specially chartered train by the redoubtable Messrs Loveday and Stoker.  

There are some things I've been unable to find a home for as yet, including a fabulous story about Barry Sullivan losing his temper over a prie-dieu which Charles Flower had purchased for the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Sullivan had it banished from the stage on the grounds that it would distract the audience from his rendition of 'To be or not be'.  

But my favourite story concerns an American actor, a certain Daniel Howard Harkins, who toured through the UK from 1879 to 1881.  D.H. Harkins billed himself as a great star - one of the foremost tragedians of the age - although one of the Belfast newspapers, reviewing his performance as Othello, confessed that they had been unable to cope with his bizarre methods of emphasising apparently random words in his speeches.  

Advert from The Era 16/4/81

As well as acting, Harkins had been a soldier in the American Civil War, rising to the rank of Major in the Unionist Army as part of the 1st New York Volunteer Cavalry.  His career on stage seems to have had its fair share of disputes and fallings out, and in 1868 he was involved in a wrangle over royalty payments which had a bizarre and rather terrifying outcome.

The Daily Alta California for 11th September 1868 relates the entire event with evident relish, quoting the New York Times at length.  Complications over the royalty payments owed for a production of  Foul Play seem to have led to the closure of the theatre and the sacking of Harkins, who then decamped to another theatre and staged the exact same play there.  The owner of the rights to the play then took out a warrant for Harkins' arrest.  

That evening, the first and second acts of the performance ran smoothly, but just before the start of Act 3 a series of pistol shots  and the sound of one of the actresses shouting 'Oh my husband!' alerted the audience to the fact that a full scale drama was unfolding behind the scenes.  Around 9pm, six men - 'ruffians' in the paper's words, although they were actually working for the Sheriff - had gathered at the stage door and demanded admittance in order to confront and arrest Harkins.  On being denied admission, they had barged through the door, injuring the stage door man and run up the steps into the wings, looking for Harkins. Not finding him they then went through the Green Room, disturbing the ladies of the Company  who were dressing there, and then seem to have rampaged through the dressing rooms, before heading back to the stage.  

Harkins, realising what was happening, had slipped under the stage, through the orchestra and escaped through the auditorium into the street.  The men - who were armed with revolvers - tried to follow him but found themselves surrounded by the backstage crew and performers who would not allow them to pass.  Shots rang out and the elderly theatre nightwatchman and one of the gas-lighters were both badly injured. By this time, reinforcements had arrived and five of the six men - one had managed to escape.

Incredibly, the performance continued with an understudy stepping into Harkins' role. The whole production was apparently later closed down by a high court injunction.  

Now, none of that is of the slightest use to me really.  But I  thoroughly enjoyed reading about it!

Like a tangled chain

(Warning - this post is rather a ramble!  There's a lot going on in my brain at the moment!)

Apologies for the radio silence. What a few weeks it has been since Christmas...

I've spent the last six weeks giving myself a crash course in the state of touring Shakespeare in 1881 and I'm finally about to try and bring it all together to create some sort of comprehensible document.  I have so much I want to say about this topic that leaving any of it out is going to be hard,  

I've also managed the 'untangling' of Winifred Isaac's book about Ben Greet - a fascinating task, not least because I've had to ask myself the question, 'Why does the structure of this book annoy me so much?' 

Isaac had clearly done a huge amount of research and had gathered together a vast number of (mainly uncredited) sources.  Pulling it all together into one volume would have been a complex task - and I don't understand why she made it more complicated by arranging the material in themes rather than chronologically, allowing us to see the development of each of the elements of Greet's work. Why couldn't she just be a bit more 'J.C. Trewin' about the whole thing and structure all that disparate material into a coherent narrative?

It was the word 'narrative' that made me stop and think.  As a former English teacher, amateur crime-writer and self-confessed book addict, I'm aware I think primarily in terms of building narratives whenever I write something.  I want there to be a 'story' of sorts and I'm sure this love of narrative is  the thing that draws me to history as well. 

But I'm aware that any history worth its salt has to be more than just a narrative, that any 'story' we construct from the facts is very much dependent on our overview - the distance between then and now allowing us to see a pattern or structure emerge from the events of someone's life is not the way they experienced it.  This distance is both illuminating and distorting.  For example, when I read about Benson being knighted at the Tercentenary performance in May 1916, I already know what follows - the loss of Stratford upon Avon, the death of Eric Benson, the break-up of the company, the collapse of a marriage and the years ahead of touring in a world that had shifted away from his type of theatre towards the 'realism' of cinema and Hollywood.  I have the advantage of being able to construct a narrative from the facts. 

Isaac's book is, in some ways, a good example of how not to do something - the traps that lie in wait for those who think writing history is a doddle - but it has also been something of a wake-up call.  I've noticed my own total lack of academic confidence can often be masked by an approach which comes across as the exact opposite: a confident arrogance bordering on the smug. I have absolutely no right to have any sense of superiority: I've yet to prove myself capable of anything.  It is always easy to be critical of the players from the bench...

Whatever its flaws, Isaac's book has proved an absolute gold mine of information and my research would have been much more difficult without it. In some ways, the fact that it is arranged in the way it is means it AVOIDS narrative: the facts presented without any attempt at making them tell a story, leaving me free to weave my own narrative from what it suggests.  

I'm not sure where I'm going with this just at the moment, but I do know that as a direct result of reading Isaacs' book, my own research has taken me along a different road to the one I thought I was on in December.  It has shifted something in my thinking and that can't be a bad thing at all.